fear, loathing, and an imaginary pandemic
The same terrible people who made COVID worse for all of us are already railing against a hantavirus pandemic that isn’t happening.
In case you managed to find yourself under a rock for the past week, a deadly outbreak of a hantavirus on a cruise ship sailing from South America has been heavily featured both in the news and on social media. Sadly, this sort of thing happens now and again, with the last outbreak sickening at least 34 and killing 11 people in Argentina in 2018 after a birthday party.
Hantaviruses are not new. They’ve been documented in ancient China and were first identified in 1951, during the Korean War when troops stationed around the Hanta river — hence the name — kept coming in contact with rodents and getting sick. Asia still sees around 150,000 cases each year, but they’re generally “dead end” infections that don’t travel from person to person.
But the problem with the last two outbreaks is that the strain in question, the Andes hantavirus, which does spread between humans who had prolonged contact in close quarters or confined spaces. Like on a cruise ship, for example. When infected patients develop respiratory problems, the fatality rate can be as high as 30% given current data, which yes, is scary.
Cue the same grifters, influencers, and ivermectin salesquacks who either generated a lot of attention during COVID, or saw others get famous for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories during the pandemic and wanted in on the fun, attention, and profit. With another disease in the news, they're excited to the point of sexual arousal that another plague may be on the horizon and are pulling out their 2020 slogans, just substituting the references to COVID with hantavirus.
They've already announced that they will not mask up, they will not social distance, they will not comply, they will not get a vaccine, and they will not lock down. Also, you should really to buy some ivermectin they just happen to have on hand, and subscribe to their latest conspiracy ramblings on Substack, or the evil cabal of scientists will get you.
Except here’s the thing. Not one of the agencies they insist is about to declare pandemic control measures is even thinking about doing so. On the contrary, experts are saying it’s nothing like COVID, or even influenza, and the WHO sees no reason to worry, unless the outbreak behaves in new and alarming ways.
There’s currently zero talk about lockdowns, mandatory masking in public, vaccination drives, or quarantines. So, for all the angry ignoramuses already screaming at the top of their keyboards that they won't comply, the official response is "comply with what?"
Every performative post of defiance and conspiratorial fear mongering is a fight against an imaginary enemy, a grift, a cry for attention, or some combination of the three. It’s as if they think they just didn’t harm enough people during the COVID pandemic which broke their minds, leaving them devoid of basic human decency, so they’re hoping for a redo or a sequel with hantavirus, pretending it’s a novel disease while recycling their greatest hits.
And unfortunately, when the next pandemic will strike, we will be worse off thanks to their efforts as they once again outshout and undermine any attempt to slow or control the spread of the disease with no care for the damage they do. Hell, they're letting their own children die of measles and deny vitamin K shots for their babies with predictable, tragic outcomes. They're not going to care if you, a random stranger, die thanks to their malicious ignorance.
Of course, the important question is why are they doing this? Well, some do it for a sense of control over something they feel powerless against. Some are motivated by the allure of money and fame from exploiting the gullible and scared. And others still are hedonists of the worst variety, people who are, at their core, just spoiled, rotten children who believe the world exists to serve them and any inconvenience in their daily life is a conspiracy against them.
So, yeah, it's almost amusing to watch them waste their rhetorical ammo to battle an imaginary crisis, but it's also unnerving to see them repeating the same exact talking points they used to undermine our response to COVID, slander doctors, nurses, and scientists, and downplay the risks of a novel disease because they saw it as nothing more than an unnecessary interruption to their routine.
They're still railing against immunologists and demanding trials for the crime of not letting them do as they pleased and being asked to maybe try to think about how their actions may affect others. And that's the really scary part. We amplify narcissists who think of others as NPCs instead of as fellow human beings, and are unable to imagine that anything can be more important than their desires, then in a real crisis, we keep allowing them to set the agenda. Which, as we've seen with COVID, the consequences of that are nothing short of disastrous.
